Previously Unpublished Works, Fascicles VI-VII

the week of unleavened bread because Sunday was the chief Christian feast-day, the Feast of the Resurrection, and it was thus that the Pascha The term for Easter, derived from the Hebrew word for Passover. came to be associated rather with the Resurrection than the Sacrifice of Christ. History shows that one section of the primitive Church—the Montanists An early Christian movement named after its leader Montanus; they were known for their strict asceticism and prophetic focus.—kept Pascha on the fourteenth day of the first (solar) month of their calendar, or—if that were a week-day—on the following Sunday (see Sozomen’s Ecclesiastical History, Book 7, Chapter 18 original: Hist. Eccl. vii. 18). As their year began on 24 March, the Pascha could range from 6 April to 12 April of the Julian Calendar—substantially what the advocates of a fixed Easter desire to adopt now; another (the Fourteenthers original: Quartodecimani; a group that insisted on celebrating Easter on the 14th day of the Jewish month of Nisan, regardless of which day of the week it fell upon.) kept it on the first fourteenth day (inclusive) of a lunar month which fell after the equinox, while the main body celebrated it on a Sunday after that date, chosen in accordance with certain rules.

The development of the Science of Time-Reckoning original: Computus resolves itself into three controversies—the method for calculating in advance the date of Easter; the basis of the Christian era; and the faults of the calendar.

1. THE METHOD OF CALCULATING THE DATE OF EASTER.

The first month of the Jewish ecclesiastical year originally began with the new moon of spring, both determined by actual observation (see Burnaby, Elements of the Jewish and Mohammadan Calendar, p. 13, and the authorities there quoted), but afterwards calculated by tables of which for some centuries we know little or nothing. The Passover was observed in this month, and as the Crucifixion and Resurrection were connected with this in date by the story of the Evangelists, Jewish Christians naturally kept Easter in the earliest times on the evening of the fourteenth day of the first month. To converts from paganism, the fact that the Resurrection took place on a Sunday was the important point, and they seem to have kept Easter on the first Sunday after the fourteenth day of that month (the Alexandrian rule), or on the first Sunday on or after the fourteenth day of that month (the British and Irish rule), or on the first Sunday after the fifteenth day of that month (the old Roman use). During the time of the persecutions this difference was tacitly overlooked, but heresy-hunting was on the increase, so that while in the middle of the second century Polycarp Bishop of Smyrna and a major figure in the early Church. could confer peaceably with Pope Anicetus on the differences in keeping Easter, by its close Pope Victor was only restrained from excommunicating Polycrates by the expostulations of Irenaeus Bishop of Lugdunum (Lyon) and a key theologian who sought to maintain Church unity despite ritual differences..